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With the meteoric success of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus placed himself among America’s most original and emotionally engaged storytellers. If his first comic novel mapped the late nineteenth-century South, Local Souls brings the twisted hilarity of Flannery O’Connor kicking into our new century.

Through memorable language and bawdy humor, Gurganus returns to his mythological Falls, North Carolina, home of Widow. This first work in a decade offers three novellas mirroring today’s face-lifted South, a zone revolutionized around freer sexuality, looser family ties, and superior telecommunications, yet it celebrates those locals who have chosen to stay local. In doing so, Local Souls uncovers certain old habits—adultery, incest, obsession—still very much alive in our New South, a "Winesburg, Ohio" with high-speed Internet.

Wells Tower says of Gurganus, "No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other." Such ties of love produce hilarious, if wrenching, complications: "Fear Not" gives us a banker's daughter seeking the child she was forced to surrender when barely fifteen, only to find an adult rescuer she might have invented. In "Saints Have Mothers," a beloved high school valedictorian disappears during a trip to Africa, granting her ambitious mother a postponed fame that turns against her. And in a dramatic "Decoy," the doctor-patient friendship between two married men breaks toward desire just as a biblical flood shatters their neighborhood and rearranges their fates.

Gurganus finds fresh pathos in ancient tensions: between marriage and Eros, parenthood and personal fulfillment. He writes about erotic hunger and social embarrassment with Twain's knife-edged glee. By loving Falls, Gurganus dramatizes the passing of Hawthorne’s small-town nation into those Twitter-nourished lives we now expect and relish.

Four decades ago, John Cheever pronounced Allan Gurganus "the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation." Local Souls confirms Cheever’s prescient faith. It deepens the luster of Gurganus’s reputation for compassion and laughter. His black comedy leaves us with lasting affection for his characters and the aching aftermath of human consequences. Here is a universal work about a village.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gurganus returns to Falls, N.C., the setting of his Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, with this trio of linked novellas. "Fear Not" subjects a smalltown golden girl to horrific loss, an unplanned pregnancy, and a lifetime of wondering about the fate of her baby. The protagonist of "Saints Have Mothers" reluctantly sees her luminous, gifted daughter off on a global adventure, and has her worst fears realized. As she handles her own grief and the unfolding spectacle of Falls's collective mourning, Gurganus ratchets up the inner keening and deftly balances it with a certain sense of escalating absurdity. In "Decoy," a family history gets spun out as a backdrop to the retirement of the town's senior physician, a friend and confidant to the narrator, Bill Mabry, who still sees himself as a bit of an interloper in the country club set. "He knew so much. And about us! Our septic innards, our secret chin-lifts, our actual alcohol intake in liters-per-day." But as Dr. Roper leaves his medical role, Mabry's sense of loss gets sharper as the two men grow more remote from each other. In these layered, often funny narratives, close reading is rewarded as Gurganus exposes humanity as a strange species. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Sept.)

*Starred Review* Gurganus revisits the North Carolina town of Falls, where he situated his roundly applauded first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989). His return to Falls is manifested in three novellas. Gurganus has never been a modest stylist. He favors, in concert with many of his fellow southerners, vivid language, provocative sentence structure, and metaphors that elevate the reader’s consciousness. He also shares with his southern cohorts a delight in discovering the quotidian within lives led under extraordinary, even bizarre circumstances. In the disturbing “Fear Not,” the male narrator attends the high-school theatrical performance of his teenage godson, accompanied by his godson’s mother. An interesting couple sits near them, and later, armed with the couple’s names, the narrator embarks on learning their story, which involves the many-years-later seeking of a child given up at birth. “Saints Have Mothers” is the slyest of the trio, a sardonic look at celebrity as a girl from Falls becomes famous for having disappeared. “Decoy,” the longest of the three, chronicles the friendship of two men from different sides of town in a meandering tale that eventually sharpens into a moving treatment of social aspiration. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Gurganus will be enjoying an extensive author tour and print and broadcast interviews, and the publisher will engage in a library marketing campaign. --Brad Hooper

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More About the Author

Alan Gurganus's, books include White People and Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Gurganus is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Adaptations of his fiction have earned four Emmys. A resident of his native North Carolina, he lives in a village of six thousand souls.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I wanted to like this book and I think I would have if I could have just gotten to the stories buried beneath the painfully overwrought prose. It seems that Gurganus forgot about writing about real human beings and lifting a reader off the page with simple imagery and real emotion. Instead it seems he wants to impress us with his ability to cleverly turn a phrase. I don't read to be impressed; I read to be entertained and enlightened. This book, sadly, did neither.

The "Local Souls" in Allan Gurganus's eponymous book title are the residents of a North Carolina town, population about 6,000. The town of "Falls, North Carolina" - featured in the one short story and two longer ones - is a relatively upscale village, particularly in the River Front section, where most of the stories take place. The residents - the "local souls" - weave in and out of the stories, but each story tends to feature it's own main characters and plot. Gurganus has a drawn map of the River Front area of Falls in both the front and back of the book, which features the main places he refers to in his stories.

And what stories they are. From the first story about a sleek family of four who have moved to the town and set the locals to talking to the middle one about a hurting family who has lost a daughter in Africa to the final one about the town's doctor and his influence on his friends and patients both during his 40 year practice and subsequent retirement, Gurganus just blows away the reader with his powerful writing. A bit like "Our Town", the residents of Falls, NC give up their secrets and their dreams in a wealth of terse writing that brings both the characters and the place to life. I guess if I have to have a "favorite" story, I'd reluctantly point to the final story - the longest - about the doctor and the town he served faithfully.

The story has two main characters - the narrator, Bill Mabry - and his doctor, "Doc" Roper. Roper, the blessed son of a socially prominent-but-poor town family, has returned to Falls in the 1950's after graduating from Yale Medical School He sets up a practice - becoming legendary in his treatment of townsfolk, both rich and poor. He diagnoses young Billy Mabry's heart condition, inherited from his father and grandfather.Read more ›

As a huge fan of Allan Gurganus, I have been checking on Amazon every few weeks for the past several years, hoping he would publish another book, so I was very excited to pre-order this one. Today, I finally finished it. There were several times along the way I thought about stopping, but I wanted to see if it got better. It didn't. It's repetitive, really repetitive, really, really repetitive. I kept thinking, "Yeah, you said that in the last chapter, and a few chapters ago." I thought about just not writing a review of this since I love his other books so much, but I decided to write one anyway; if for nothing else, just to tell readers to purchase his other books and to avoid this one. All of his other books are terrific.

Gurganus is a master story teller and I could not stop reading a chapter without finishing it. But... in the end, I wonder what the point of reading the stories is. Other than a platform for Gurganus' brilliant writing, the stories seemed to have no meaning or point. It is like reading a bystander's thoughts as he takes in the "local souls" and there is no particular reason to want to hear the stories.

I am a huge Allan Gurganus fan. Plays Well With Others is one of the best books I've read in the last fifteen years. When I find it on the shelves of a used book store, I always buy it. It's one of those books I give to friends whenever someone is looking for "something good to read." I'd say over the years the split has been 75/25 between those who say "Oh my lord, I loved it. I couldn't put it down" to (and this is my favorite, from a colleague I absolutely adore) "This man knows too many words. And uses them all." I even enjoyed The Practical Heart, which, I thought, demonstrated his expertise with the novella.

So, it was with considerable relish that I cracked the spine on Local Souls when it arrived a few days ago. By the end, I felt rather like Doc in the third (and longest) story . . . out in the weeds, searching for something that sadly never turns up.

Why, I kept asking myself, was I so disappointed? Gurganus has certainly shown that the knows how to handle long form narrative. And, as I've said, Practical Heart shows his mastery of novella form. But this....this.... What is THIS? I think it's because it's such a radical departure in style--linguistically--from what I've come to expect from Gurganus. Plays well is full of colored ribbons of prose that unfurl before the reader, and cannot be fully appreciated until the entire length of it is seen. Practical Heart has "good serge" sentences with hand-turned buttonholes that spark admiration of their craftsmanship. I can only liken Local Souls to reading a story that has been run through the shredder, then thrown up in the air to slowly flutter down around the reader.

I am still of the opinion that Gurganus is a masterful writer and look forward to further work from him. But this is not a collection I would recommend to friends.